Patrick White  - Quotes

 Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed. 

Tags: comfort   futility   hotels   novels   whisky     


Abdul Nannan  - Quotes

 Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain 

Tags: asimov   frustration   futility   reason     
Kurt Vonnegut  - Quotes

 ...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE 

Tags: futility   ignorance   permanence     


P.D. James  - Quotes

 Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin. 

Tags: futility   pessimism   posterity     
Aaron Sorkin  - Quotes

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Tags: abyss   futility     
Kurt Vonnegut  - Quotes

 He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'

'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'

'What's so negative about it?' I said.

'What could be a more negative word than
 

Tags: futility   ignorance   inspirational     
Kurt Vonnegut  - Quotes

 If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness. 

Tags: foolishness   futility     
Bruce Sterling  - Quotes

 (He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute 

Tags: absolutes   freedom   futility   mankind     
William Butler Yeats  - Quotes

 The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

Tags: futility   pessimism     
Michael Chabon  - Quotes

 Man makes plans . . . and God laughs. 

Tags: futility     
Erich Maria Remarque  - Quotes

 How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. 

Tags: futility     
Confucius  - Quotes

 The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. 

Tags: futility   knowledge   religion     


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